Five more art things. five art things, five more art things happening somewhere around right now or any moment now. Five art shows to check out in the coming days. An (almost) weekly round up of recommended art events. Five shows, exhibitions or things we rather think might be worth checking out. Mostly London things for that is where we currently operate and explore, and like we said last time, these five recommendations come with no claims that they are “the best five” or the “Top Five”, we’re not one of those annoying art websites that ignore most things whilst claiming to be covering everything and proclaiming this or that to be the “top seven things” or the “best things this weekend”, no, this is simply a regular list of five or so art recommended things coming up soon that we think you might find as interesting as we do.

Five art things happening now and coming up in the next few days in no particular order, just five art things happening around about now

1: Vlatka Horvat – By Hand, On Foot at Peer – 4th Feb until 2nd April (opening night, 6pn until 8pm, 3rd Feb) –  PEER presents an exhibition of ambitious new works by Vlatka Horvat. Having exhibited extensively across Europe, USA and further afield, this will be her first solo exhibition in London, where she has lived for more than a decade.

“Horvat’s practice spans sculpture, installation, video and photography, as well as performance, publications and public interventions. Her work often involves gestures of reconfiguring space and the spatial and inherent social relations at play – exploring the precarious relationship between bodies, objects, materials, the built environment, and landscape.   The central element of her exhibition at PEER will be an epic series of 365 A4 works on paper – one produced for every day of 2021. Each is based on a photograph the artist has taken on her daily walk, which she then playfully and radically reimagines using drawing and collage. Titled To See Stars over Mountains, the work will densely occupy the whole of the second gallery space at PEER. The works mirror, amplify, extend, repeat, and morph aspects of the landscape – celebrating the everyday as well as transforming it radically, bringing new eyes and possibilities to urban space To See Stars over Mountains will also be presented as an artist book documenting the entire series. The 376-page book, published in collaboration with PEER and Unstable Object, will launch at the opening of the exhibition and will be available to purchase. Alongside the collages, Horvat will show a new sculptural installation that speaks directly to the street via PEER’s large storefront windows, and a new video produced in 2021.

PEER is at 99 Hoxton Street, London, N1 6QL. The show runs from 4th Feb until 2nd April (opening night, 6pn until 8pm, 3rd Feb), The gallery is open Wednesdays to Saturdays, midday until 6pm

2: FPS at The Muse at 269 – 3rd Feb until 20th Feb 2022 (evening opening 3rd Feb, 6pm until 9pm) –  “We are delighted to welcome back The Free Painters and Sculptors” say The Muse, now we expect this group show should have soemthing interesting to offer, The gallery says “The FPS Artists emerge confidently from lockdown with their first group show since the huge success of the second London Ultra at the Bargehouse in December 2019.  As ever, this contemporary group of Artists shine with ingenuity. FPS at the Muse 2022 is a wide variety of accomplished pieces from 17 artists, ranging from an exceedingly witty and topical series of highly collectable Covid -inspired Illustrations by Tim Major – humorously capturing the uniqueness of the predicament of our times –  to a selection of elegant Polished Steel Sculptures – for your garden by Simon Probyn and sensitive and most precious emotive ceramics by Sarah E Choi. and so much more.

The 17 artists are Alexandra Harley, Adam Zoltowski, Bettina Reiber, Bina Shah, Henryk Terpilowski, Joanna Ciechanowska, Leila Godden, Louisa Crispin, Marek E Olszewski, Małgorzata Łapsa-Malawska, Maria Kaleta, Michael Hempstead, Nicholas Cheeseman, Sarah E Choi, Simon Probyn, Tim Major and Veronica van Eijk.  FPS is an established artist-led organisation that promotes and exhibits a talented membership of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers and Photographers at renowned central London galleries twice a year.  With 65 years of experience, FPS helps artists build long-term networks that develop artistic sustainability, exposure and sales, whilst also encouraging artists to create work on their own terms….and therefore be ‘free’. Established in 1952, FPS was originally associated with the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts). Founding members featured many high profile and influential artists, including Roy Rasmussen, Lyall Watson and Maurice Jadot who all feature in the permanent Tate Collection. FPS originally came to prominence by playing a significant part in the establishment of abstract art in the 1950’s and 60’s and were the first of a number of post war movements that freed artists from the orthodoxy of rigid and purely technical judgements.  This ethos continues today and we welcome applications from talented artists at all stages of their career”.

The Muse at 269 is at 269 Portobello Road, London, W11 1LR. The gallery is open Tuesday until Sunday, midday until 6pm. 3rd Feb until 20th Feb 2022 (evening opening 3rd Feb, 6pm until 9pm)

3; Roxy Lee’s Cold Lunch  at Ridley Road Project Space –  Roxy Lee’s ‘Cold Lunch’ exhibition opens for the so called private view on 3rd Feb, 5:30pm–9:30pm, Ridley Road Project Space, Dalston, Hackney, E8 2NP and is then open Friday and Saturday, 1pm–6pm. Find it up in the block behind or besided the market, there’s probably a note gaffa-taped to the door or something. Previously at the same space if you need more clues – ORGAN THING: The Grotto at East London’s Ridley Road Project Space, it was a “secluded and treasure-like notion” of an art show…

4: Ansel Krut – The Art I Live With, The Things I Love at Claas Reiss – 5th Feb until 19th March – “The Art I Live With, The Things I Love by Ansel Krut at Claas Reiss aims at giving a glimpse into the mind of a painter by bringing together works and objects by Krut, fellow artists and Krut’s family members”.

‘I’ve never been one for possessions, for owning stuff. Perhaps it’s some kind of ancestral anxiety about the need to travel light, and objects are heavy, physically and psychologically. But some things that I have come across, had given to me, made, found, otherwise come into contact with, have stuck to me like burrs; paintings, drawings, artefacts, postcards, books, things my children have made. So when Claas asked me to do this exhibition, a glimpse into the mind of a painter as evidenced in the stuff they live with, I was surprised to discover how much I had actually accumulated.  Not all of it has been on actual display in my house or studio, much has been in draws, under piles of other things, in forgotten corners, but always there, always acting on my mind in some way. And when I bring them all together, when I become consciously aware of each of them in relation to one another I realise, with surprise, they form a “collection”.

In 2011 my late wife, Felicity Powell, curated an exhibition of charms and amulets at the Wellcome Collection, just around the corner from Claas Reiss. She prefaced it with a quote from Montaigne: “It seems like the soul… loses itself in itself when shaken and disturbed unless given something to grasp on to; and so we must always provide it with an object to butt up against and to act upon.” (‘Essais’, 1580). The objects I have put together for this exhibition, and it turns out be a very small part of what I could have chosen, are those things I butt up against for my soul’s sake, and which act on me on a daily basis in my life as a painter.’ (Ansel Krut, 2021)

The exhibition aims at giving a glimpse into the mind of a painter by bringing together paintings, drawings, artefacts, postcards, books and personal family objects by Krut, fellow artists and family members. Artists in the exhibition include Jane Alexander, Max Beckmann, E J Bellocq, Lauren Bon, Matthew Burrows, Nick Goss, Ron Kitaj, Ansel Krut, Anna Liber Lewis, Neville Lewis, Rich Nielsen, Felicity Powell, Dillwyn Smith and Walter Swennen. The exhibition is accompanied by ‘Possibilities and Pleasures’, an essay by Ken Arnold, formerly Creative Director at Wellcome in London, and currently Director of Medical Museion and Professor at University of Copenhagen. A 45min walk-through of the exhibition by Ansel Krut and Ken Arnold is scheduled on Wednesday, 23 February at 5pm.

Ansel Krut was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1959. He studied medicine for two years before switching to Fine Art and he graduated with a BA from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1982. After a scholarship to the Cité des Arts in Paris he completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London. He was the Abbey Major Scholar in Painting at the British School at Rome in 1986/87 and then stayed on in Italy for a subsequent three years, returning to London in 1990. He now lives and works in London interspersed with extended stays in Los Angeles. Krut was a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art from 2006 to 2014 and he has taught at many other art colleges throughout the UK. He was an artist-lecturer at the National Gallery in London from 2004 to 2012. Ansel Krut’s work has been widely exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Marlborough in New York (2013, 2016 and 2019), Modern Art in London (2010 and 2014) and institutional shows include ‘Verbatim’ at Jerwood Gallery (2014, now Hastings Contemporary) in Hastings and ‘Schilderijen’ at Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort (2011).  His work remains informed by the years he spent growing up in South Africa, his art retaining what Ed Krcma in a catalogue essay called “an unapologetic will to insubordination” with imagery that has “arisen from a ferment of intermingled sources: from the enchanted collective narratives of folklore, to the differently dark ruins of history”.

Writing in the Brooklyn Rail in 2019 Alfred Mac Adam said: “Ansel Krut’s extraordinary paintings take us back to 20th century existential angst and its unending inquiry into identity, fate, and self-determination. His painterly style may seem casual, crude, and ludic, but this is work of high seriousness and deep moral content.”

Claas Reiss  is at 96 Robert Street, London, NW1 3QP.  The show runs from 5 February to 19 March 2022. The “Private view” is on Saturday 5 February 2022 from 12 to 8pm. The gallery is open Tuesday until Saturday, 10pm until 6pm, midday until 6pm Saturdays. The gallery website was a little out of date when we looked.

5: A heavy tether: new paintings by Rhiannon Inman-Simspon at Bobinska Brownlee New River Gallery – 3rd Feb  – 26th Feb 2022 – “Rhiannon Inman-Simpson’s current work explores visceral encounters between body and place. The work looks at the differences in how we navigate, both physically and imaginatively, three distinct realms: the bodily experience of an environment, the pictorial space of a painting and the space of written language. Approaching each painting instinctively, she moves between colour, form and marks in the way she might move her body through a physical environment. Through a process of layering and removing paint, colours begin to vibrate and interrupt each other and forms emerge and dissolve. There is a play of weight and air in the paintings: these spaces are rooted to the ground but have air to breathe.

“I peel off the skin of the day and stand in the blue with my boots untied. The air moves too fast against the dark but light bounces back at me. It keeps me up with its noise, pushing against the membrane which separates us from the blackness.”

Bobinska Brownlee New River is a new gallery project in a domestic setting in Islington, North London. Actually finding anaddress anywahere is proving impossible – “Canonbury, Islington, 2 mins from Essex Rd railway station” is what they say on Instagram, the gallery’s own website, thier Facebook page or their listing on Art Rebbit offers no more than Instagram tells us. Open Thur-Sat 2-6pm, 0786 606 3663″ is what they say on Instagram The show runs from 3rd Feb  – 26th Feb 2022, there’s a so called “private view” on Saturday 5th February 12-6pm to which they say everyone is welcome. Not sure why a gallery wouldn’t print an actual address? Nothing but a vague clue that the gallery is in Cannonbury. Watch this space, see if we find it or if they reply… Stop press: They replied, 38 Tower Court, N1 2US.